On The Temporary Nature of Digital Existence

Normally, the words I type here are movie reviews. When I started, I had some more ambitious plans. I would also do book reviews, the occasional TV show, and I had a podcast. The podcast itself, which I had to give up digital hosting for, so it probably doesn’t exist, was also more ambitious as I had thought that I would be having discussions with various people I knew on various topics that I thought were interesting enough to merit an episode. That was it. I had no grand illusions that I was going to have the most popular show of all time, or even something that would make me any money. I just wanted to have conversations with friends and share them. In the end, my podcast was always with the same person (and she’s awesome) on the same topic, a movie we both watched on our own, and that’s fine.

However, I have, of late, been more inclined to think of how the online life, the digital existence if you will, can be so damn fleeting sometimes. Maybe it’s a sign of aging. I’m past the half century mark in age, not quite ready to retire by a long shot, but not a young man anymore either. Things change, and some of what has changed is probably common to people and places since the beginning of time, but other things are, I suspect, a product of our digital age. I’m Gen X. I remember the time before and after the Internet became a thing. We were the people who first learned how to use it, and we are the people who watched out Boomer and Silent and Greatest Generation forebears (if they lived long enough) not quite get it while out Millennial successors came to it as a thing that was pretty much always there. Personally, I think Gen Z is going to be the same with AI, but that’s neither here nor there.

I can’t say what it was that got me thinking this way, but I would argue it wasn’t just one thing. If I look back on my life, I can see some milestones. Oldest of four, the first and only one to go away to grad school, not quite finishing the Ph.D, getting a (generally) great full time job in my field, marrying, divorcing, and then finding someone better that may be the one I was looking for the whole time, making friends, watching friends and younger siblings marry and have kids of their own, and just watching the world change. It hasn’t always been easy or fun, but it’s been something.

As it is, I was thinking about the nature of digital friendships. I don’t mean befriending a chatbot. I mean in those early days of the Internet when I actually met people online with similar interests and struck up something like friendship with many of them. More than a few I have met in person. I consider many of them good friends, and I still have some form of contact with many. I think I met the lion’s share of them on the old DC Comics message board, a place where people could comment on DC publications, occasionally interacting with the talent, and then chat about things that had absolutely nothing to do with comics. Some of us formed our own online communities, and those communities, well..they migrated a lot. I know a few such web communities where we would have our own message boards, but then something would happen. Maybe the owner just couldn’t deal with it anymore. Maybe the site’s hosting company went belly-up and didn’t warn anybody. And sometimes, well, it was about money because running a website can be expensive. At the very least, it isn’t free if you don’t want to risk attaching yourself to some pre-existing company that may or may not still be there at a certain point in time. I don’t make any money off this site, keep everything barebones, and I know if there comes a time when I need to cut something from my budget, this blog may be it.

For now, that is not a problem.

But here I am at some point in my fifth decade on this Earth, and a few things hit me that made me go “huh.” For starters, I used to belong to a small online gaming group that met for the original City of Heroes MMORPG. We made characters, assumed an identity, and met once a week for what was basically roleplaying. I learned maybe a year or two ago that two members of the group got married when I wasn’t even aware they were dating. Heck, when I first met them online, he lived in the Buffalo area while she was in Houston. I don’t think there was even a hint of anything back in our gaming days, and while I hadn’t spoken to either in a while, I was still “friends” with at least one of them on Facebook. And I thought to myself, “How should I feel about that?” I mentioned the wedding to another member of the old group, this one someone I knew in real life well before I started talking on online message boards, and her reaction was about the same as mine. Now, friends drifting apart over time happens for a wide range of reasons. Is that what happened here? As it is, I wish the happy couple good luck and a long life together wherever they are.

But that’s the thing about digital existence, isn’t it? If something happened to Meta tomorrow, causing Facebook and Instagram to just vanish into the either, would we have anything to show for it? There’s a reason purists push for people to get physical copies of media and not to rely on digital ones: digital ones can be taken away rather easily. There’s a reason I have never seen Cocoon, and that’s because I didn’t see it when it was new and now that I am interested in catching up on the things I missed, it isn’t even available for DVD, Blu-ray, or streaming for rights issues or something. You’d have to go out and buy a very expensive physical copy off eBay to get it in 2026. There was a small YouTube channel I liked, one I even gave a small monthly donation to on Patreon, that just vanished one day when the creator, whose content was mostly doing comedic summaries of popular movies, just deleted his channel because he was trying to be a professional content creator and his videos were, according to him, constantly being demonetized by whoever owned the rights to the movies he kept summarizing. I couldn’t show you one of his videos now if I wanted to.

But I think the one that really hit me was when I realized one of those online friends, someone I had good repartee with, someone I trusted to let me know when I said the wrong thing without realizing it, someone I had met in-person many times, had just deleted her Facebook account, and I have no idea how to contact her. I have a phone number saved in my phone. Is it still good? Should I call her? Text? Something? I’m not sure what the etiquette here is. If she wanted away from social media, I get that. I can respect her wishes. It’s the uncertainty of it all. As I said above, part of getting older is drifting away from old friends. It happens to everyone. The thing about the way it happens online is that it can just be so damn sudden.

Anyway, Rai, in the unlikely event that you see this, good luck to you.

These were thoughts I’ve been having for a while. I’ve been dating my girlfriend to the point where I want her to start meeting my friends, but the friends I most want her to meet don’t live that local, and then there’s the whole having to find time to meet part. Adulthood is a lot more complicated for that sort of thing. We’re both introverts by nature, but we do like the company of others, and I think she’d like the people I most want her to meet at some point. I do know that I probably enjoy time spent with her right now more than anyone else, but there are other people I want to introduce her to all the same. It’s something about letting her meet the people of my past that, in whatever small way they could, helped me become who I am today. That’s how life works: you meet people, and many of them help you become who you are, and that version of you is hopefully a better person.

I mean, I got a taste of that this week. A pair of former students told me that they had cause to remember lessons of mine. One said he impressed people by telling them about the colon as a form of punctuation because I taught it to him. Another said I taught him the valuable lesson that artificial intelligence will never say “I don’t know.” That’s a nice feeling. That was followed up the next day by a class full of my current students telling me I was the GOAT because I didn’t come down on them like a hammer for not paying attention–I remember my own college professors in the 90s telling me they didn’t care if I or my classmates paid attention because if we failed it was our own fault, see above about how the people you meet influence the person you become–and being the teacher you can ignore sure sounds to me like the opposite of being the GOAT, but what do I know? And these students purported to actually like me.

I have mixed feelings on this ending. For one thing, while I spent years writing articles over there (over 10,000 of them going back over a decade), many of those articles were short things where I commented on an episode of a TV show I watched or a comic book I read, something that took maybe 20 minutes to write and 2 minutes to read. I won’t miss the overwhelming majority of them. I did it, essentially, as a hobby, especially for the years after my ex-wife moved out and before I met my current girlfriend. It was a way to keep myself amused and have a goal of some kind. Even after the others stopped posting regularly, I kept going. Now I have a girlfriend who wants to spend time with me in-person, someone I enjoy talking to and being with. Times change. Maybe I started to notice it last year when I had to put my cat down, the mascot of my virtual endeavors. Maybe it was just the fact I wasn’t doing it as much. All I know is Gabbing Geek won’t be around much longer, but for the time it was there, it was a hell of a lot of fun at times.

The Tomcast 2020

Plus, that last month means that, unlike other digital deaths, I have time to save a few things. For the most part, there’s one set of articles I have on Gabbing Geek that will be rescuing: the AFI Countdown, when I spent the better part of a year in 2018 watching and writing down my thoughts on the movies on the American Film Institute’s original 100 Greatest Movies list. It’s actually easy to do. I can literally cut-and-paste the old article into a new one here, and I’ll be doing some light editing. That means fixing typos and other things that slipped through the cracks, removing hyperlinks that won’t be working once Gabbing Geek shuts down, and a few other things. Those will start appearing here on Monday afternoon. I’ll also try to keep going the one thing we did there annually, the Year in Anticipation, where in one massive post, we’d talk about whatever entertainment we were looking forward to in the coming year. Those were always a blast to put together. so I’m hoping we can keep making those here however we end up doing them.

I think things turned out OK here. I think I sensed the end coming for a while,. I just didn’t think it would happen as suddenly as it would–no one ever does for this sort of thing–but I still have the people to talk to, and the people were always more important than the writing.

Anyway, I have no idea how long this site is going to last either, but it’s not really going anywhere for the time being. If you made it this far, thanks for indulging me on this. If you didn’t, I have no idea how you are reading this sentence.

Tom